Understanding how blogs can support collaborative learning is a vital concern for researchers and teachers. This article explores how blogs may be used to support secondary education students' collaborative interaction and how such an interaction process can promote the creation of a Community of Inquiry to enhance critical thinking and…

Research trends related to e-learning systems are oriented towards increasing the efficiency and capacity of the systems, thus they reflect a large variance in performance when considering content conformity and quality standards. The Framework related to standardisation of digital content for e-learning systems is likely to play a significant…

This article discusses the combination of methods used in a study of the use of Facebook as an educational resource by a class of five students at a sixth-form college in north-west England. Through a project in which teacher-researcher and student-participants co-constructed a Facebook group page about the students' scaffolded research into…

Neoliberalism has become the dominant ideology of our day. As with all ideologies, it influences without drawing attention to itself. Critical pedagogy, with its focus on the oppressed and marginalised, offers a perspective on the media and education that seeks to expose neoliberalism's hegemonic power. Traditional media has become complicit…

Social media now form a common part of university students' experience. Both at university and after graduation, in their personal and professional lives, social media offer opportunities for connection previously unavailable. The ubiquitous nature of social networking has brought with it professional and ethical issues that need to be…

Technological developments are impacting upon UK assessment practices in many ways. For qualification awarding bodies, a key example of such impact is the ongoing shift towards examiners marking digitally scanned copies of examination scripts on screen rather than the original paper documents. This digitisation process has obvious benefits,…

Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a…

This article is an exploratory study of student behavior using online tools to do project-based work for a library science course at a mid-sized Midwestern public university. The population was 22 net generation students aged 18-24, who were enrolled in an Introduction to Information Resources course. The study was designed to better understand…

This article investigates the tendency of those who explore the topic of "electronic literacies" to downplay the fundamental nature and importance of the perceptual habits associated with print literacy, and highlights the opposite tendency of reading and writing specialists to decontextualize the acquisition of these fundamental skills from the…

This article explores different forms of openness and closure in two knowledge communities: the fictional world of Castalia in Hermann Hesse's great work "The Glass Bead Game", and the twenty-first-century cyberspatial universe of Wikipedia. These two worlds differ in some important respects, but they also share a number of educationally…

This article presents a qualitative case study that uses discourse and social semiotic analysis methods in order to examine the rhetorical construction of fictional personas within an online role play used for learning in the college classroom. Of special focus are the differing patterns of semiotic resource use (for example, language and…

The aim of this article is to present the findings from a small exploratory case study of an open course on cyberpunk literature conducted at the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), an online grass-roots organisation that runs non-accredited courses. Employing actor network theory to inform an ethnographic-inductive approach, the case study sought to…

This article explores some of the legal and law-related challenges educators face in designing, implementing, and sustaining globally networked learning environments (GNLEs) in the context of conflicting international laws on intellectual property and censorship/free speech. By discussing cases and areas involving such legal issues, the article…

The power to influence others in ever expanding social networks in the new knowledge economy is tied to capabilities with digital media production that require increased technological knowledge. This article draws on research in primary classrooms to examine the repertoires of cross-disciplinary knowledge that literacy learners need to produce…

This article discusses a study of three Australian middle-years teachers who deployed Learning by Design principles and practice to support multiliteracies learning through students' production of digital/multimodal texts. The aim of the research was to develop an understanding of how three teachers embraced new e-learning pedagogical designs for…